Wikis

On the Learning 2.0 front this week, I spent about an hour and a half learning about and exploring wikis. I had forgotten that I already had some experience at least reading a wiki: C'YAAL has a wiki and I also perused the one the ALA had up for the 2007 Annual Conference that I attended. I recently edited or added a couple of entries to the C'YAAL wiki.
The wikis on the Learning 2.0 site that I explored and found interesting were: SJCPL Subject Guides. I really liked how this was organized. It seemed easy to navigate and I think the language is easier for patrons to understand. I loved the Book Lovers Wiki and found it similar to JCPL's teen page book reviews. I think having the picture of the book covers really jazzed it up. I also liked that it was divided by subject somewhat. It made it easier to find the types of reviews I was most interested in. Library Success: a Best Practices Wiki seemed overwhelming at first, but then I looked under "services for specific groups" and choose "teens". I perused the wikis, blogs and MySpace pages. I was impressed with ALD's MySpace page. I decided not to look at the ALA 2006 wiki since I had used the 2007 ALA wiki prior to attending the conference. Now that I know more about wikis, I would have loved to have had a laptop with wifi at the conference to keep up on the constant changes that were happening while I was there. I noticed immediately that the Bull Run Library wiki wasn't sponsored or associated with the library system. I wonder why? It was interesting and I got a big kick out of the link to the "uncyclopedia" definition of a librarian.
Applications in a library that I think a wiki would work well for: keeping track of what is happening in YASC. Since we meet only a few times a year, I think we could interact more using a wiki. I'm really liking the one we have for C'YAAL, so I think it is great for collaborating. Maybe Nikki and I can use it with the school media specialists. I think we should get book reviews on our website like SJCPL did. I think our patrons would like it a lot. Think of it as an online interactive book display. I can't think of anything else right now - lunch time!